Greatness of Soul and the Souls of Women: Rousseau's Use of Plato's Laws in the Letter to D'Alembert

ABSTRACT:

This article completes the discussion of Plato’s Laws and Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert begun in the previous issue of this journal. Using what he had learned from Plato, Rousseau explains and defends the education of women that fits them to rule men in a modern republic. His philosophically informed analysis and defense of the bourgeois family was a challenge to the French Enlightenment, as it is to the dominant views of our own time. It has not yet been proven wrong.